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Australian scholar Jessica Gilbey explains an often ignored relationship—that between Anaïs Nin and her mother. Nin’s connection with her father has received a lot of intention, and to this day search data for their incestuous relationship on this blog remains among the top five. Searches for Rosa Culmell de Nin? Virtually none.

Jessica Gilbey

When Gilbey decided to write her doctoral thesis on how motherhood played a major role in Nin’s writing, her supervisor advised her to also explore Nin’s relationship with her own mother, which, at first, Gilbey was reluctant to do—mainly because the mother seemed to be mundane, plain, prosaic. But when she truly began to explore the bond between them, she discovered how much it informed Nin’s decisions, her rebellions, her path in life, her art, and even the other relationship in her life, including her father.

Listen as Gilbey brilliantly and objectively discusses how Nin became a symbolic mother to many and biological mother to none, and how critics lashed out at her for her life choices, not to mention her decision to write about them.

Re-Viewing Anaïs (Scars Publications, 2015) is a collection of author Rochelle Lynn Holt’s essays and reviews regarding her mentor, Anaïs Nin, with whom she collaborated in the 1960s and 1970s. Culled from several different publications, the book gives us a good overview of Holt’s regard of Nin’s work. As Holt says in her postscript:

Re-Viewing Anaïs is a semi-academic collection of forty-nine essays/reviews that have been published individually in various periodicals from the Sixties to the present time. They represent virtually every one of Anaïs Nin’s publications in her lifetime and posthumously.

According to the postscript, Holt operated a handpress much in the same way Nin did in the 1940s, and Nin herself mentions Holt’s press in her Diary. Holt earned her MFA from Writers Workshop and her Ph.D. from Columbia Pacific University.